I am pulling my hair out trying to teach my kinders how to play. I have tried modeling, using two higher students as models and they just don't get it. I have a lot of students who are monolingual and I did my best to pair them with students with more English and who know more letters and sounds. Right now I can't even get them to follow with their finger. Maybe it is just too soon?? And I need to wait a little longer before we try the game again? I wanted to start because are school has a testing our class every week for their letters and sounds using AIMSWEB (similar to dibels) and I was hoping the speed and tracking skills in SuperSpeed would transfer over and help them. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Hi there! I teach kindergarten, as well. I used the Super Speed game in small group last year. It was a bit easier to manage and I could teach and model what they needed to do in order to play the game. I have not yet introduced it this year, but what I will probably do differently is give each student their own superspeed list. They can track their own letters and will not have to focus on the turn taking, which is difficult.

Another tool that you may wish to try is Vanderphonics. The are phonics cards that were created by Jay Vanderfin. I use them in my class and have had tremendous success with students learning the letters, sounds and gestures.

I also use the Biffytoons for sight word recognition and WOWEEE! They are fabulous. I had to step out of my room breifly today for an IEP meeting an our school counsellor worked those cards with my class and she was so very impressed.

Good Luck....We have testing this Thursday, I can not wait to see the results!

How can I get the Vanderphonics? I didn't see it on the downloads. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I made individual Superspeed folders for all my students. I think the issue is that my students come in VERY low, with little or no exposure to print so their concepts of print are very low. We are still working on tracking from left to right I think it is just going to take a lot of practice before we can play. I have been using Zoo Phonics with my class and Biffytunes, but progress is slow right now ... very slow. I worked in small groups this afternoon modeling and practicing the game, so maybe that will help too.. I really want them to be able to play and enjoy it though.

You are right, they are not in the downloadable section...If you search "Alphabet letter cards" in the box above where is says, search forum, you will go to that discussion and Jay Vanderfin responded previously to another post regarding the same request.
Hope this helps!

I use the Superspeed during my buddies time. My kids are paired up with upper grade buddies and that has been very successful for me! To help the students with tracking, I give them "mini-pointers" which are really just plastic stirrers that I buy from the dollar store. Something about pointing to the letters one at a time with a pointer helps. I also have the children only beat their own records--not paired up doing every other one. Since they have a big buddy--I would rather they practice the letters, rather than the little buddies. HOwever, I did do it with small groups before with my kinders and I had three pairs who took turns, but I color coded the words (this was when we were doing the SuperSpeed words)--differently than how they are color coded on the site. I had the words in red and black--so they were in black red black red black red order. Then I told student one to read all the black words and student two to read the red words. That helped with taking turns.
Hope this helps::